New Emergency General Surgery current awareness bulletin

On April 17th we launched a new current awareness bulletin aimed at all our fellows and members in the General Surgery specialty. These surgeons spend a significant proportion of their time covering emergency procedures – essentially, any unplanned surgery that a patient may need, such as appendectomies or gall bladder operations. Inevitably those patients are often acutely ill, so in many cases these are life-or-death operations. Mortality rates for emergency procedures are as high as 15-20%. In comparison, elective (or planned) cardiac surgery has a mortality rate of 1-2% (RCS and ASGBI, Emergency General Surgery).

In 2013 the RCS and the ASGBI identified areas in which Emergency General Surgery had fallen behind elective surgery and set out a plan of action to remedy this. One part of the plan concerns developing and using the evidence base of academic medical research, and the Library has been able to assist with this through our current awareness service.

There is a vast amount of medical research published every day, far more than any practicing surgeon could ever hope to read. The Current Awareness team in the Library sifts through the many specialty and cross-specialty journals, picking out the most important and relevant articles. We work closely with clinical advisors, who provide detailed guidance on the structure of each bulletin, clinical topics and our article selections. We also attended a recent conference, in order to have a better understanding of the challenges associated with emergency general surgery.

The bulletins feature a short summary for each article and full text links where covered by the College’s e-journal subscriptions and they are emailed to fellows and members with a particular interest in the subject. This bulletin will be sent out bi-monthly and immediate feedback suggests it will be very useful in helping surgeons keep up to date with research in this pressurised environment.

The current awareness service already covers Cardiothoracic, Urology, Vascular, Plastic & Reconstructive, Trauma & Orthopaedic, and Paediatric surgery, as well an over-arching bulletin on Patient Safety. Find out more.

Tom Macmillan, Information Services Librarian